Syrians Bar U.N. Monitors From a Massacre Inquiry

A hotel employee raised the Syrian national flag in Damascus on Thursday.Credit
Youssef Badawi/European Pressphoto Agency

ANTAKYA, Turkey — The Syrian conflict escalated to a dangerous new level on Thursday when government troops and their civilian supporters blocked unarmed United Nations monitors from investigating a massacre of farm families, prompting sharp denunciations of Damascus from diplomats who have struggled vainly to find a workable, consensus solution to the crisis.

The monitors were thwarted from reaching the tiny hamlet of Qubeir, just west of Hama, to check on what activists say was the slaying of as many as 78 people, half of them women and children, who were shot, garroted and in some cases burned alive. The monitors themselves were fired upon, United Nations officials said.

The standoff at a government checkpoint seemed to symbolize the international paralysis over how to stem the bloodshed. It would be the fourth massacre in two weeks and suggested that the Syrian conflict was spiraling, seemingly daily, toward a sectarian civil war, pitting a government dominated by the Alawite sect against members of a Sunni Muslim majority feeling vulnerable to slaughter with no consequence. The Qubeir victims were all thought to be Sunnis.

The massacre and the government’s attempt to prevent the monitors from investigating it came as Kofi Annan, the special envoy from the United Nations and the Arab League, addressed both the General Assembly and the Security Council in an effort to salvage his six-point peace plan from irrelevance. He warned that the already terrible violence would only increase without concerted international pressure, which should be exerted through some kind of “contact group” involving key international powers and Syria’s neighbors.

“We cannot allow mass killing to become part of everyday reality in Syria,” Mr. Annan told the General Assembly, while blaming both sides for the intensification. “If things do not change, the future is likely to be one of brutal repression, massacres, sectarian violence and even all-out civil war. All Syrians will lose.”

Mr. Annan said that since his visit to Damascus last week, and despite promises from President Bashar al-Assad to respect the peace plan, which includes a cease-fire, there had been more violence throughout Syria with worse shelling of cities. The government-backed militia “seem to have free rein with appalling consequences,” he said. Armed opposition elements had intensified their attacks as well, he said.

United Nations monitors stationed across the country, including Deir al-Zour, Idlib, Homs and Hama, as well as Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city, have all reported increased shelling and firing. “You see a more than serious uptick in violence in all the places where we are,” said Jean-Marie Guehenno, a senior deputy to Mr. Annan.

Opposition activists said that an assault on the town of Hiffeh, just east of Latakia, which began last Monday, included the first use of missiles fired from helicopter gunships since the protests that started in March 2011 escalated into armed clashes last fall.

The violence is intensifying for several reasons, diplomats and other analysts believe.

First, Mr. Assad has been known to follow his late father, Hafez al-Assad, on the way he rules. His father crushed an insurgency in 1982 by wiping out an entire neighborhood in Hama.

Second, the support of Russia, China and Iran, along with the continued declaration of the international community that there will be no military intervention, has left him assured of no real consequences to his actions. “They feel they are in control and don’t need to listen,” said a United Nations diplomat familiar with Mr. Annan’s negotiations. “Assad is just too comfortable.”

Third, Mr. Assad knows that if he stops the violence and actually engages in a political process, his government will be doomed by a mass protest movement.

“I think this regime all along has believed there is a security solution,” said Mona Yacoubian, a senior adviser on the Middle East at the Stimson Center in Washington. “It can simply kill its way out of this.”

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The New York Times

There seemed to be consensus that a broader effort was required to bring pressure to bear. Mr. Annan was proposing a kind of working group to enforce his peace plan. It would include the permanent members of the Security Council — the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France — but remove it from the muscle-flexing over issues like military interference and sanctions that have stymied action. The group would also include regional players including Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Putting all those countries in the same room could help produce the concerted action needed to de-escalate the violence, Mr. Guehenno said, and even if they do not all agree on the source of the problem they do recognize the cost. “There is some alignment of interest between powers that have very different views on the situation,” Mr. Guehenno said.

Russia and the United States, which have been holding a series of meetings on Syria, are considered crucial players. Mr. Annan is due to hold talks with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in Washington on Friday. Washington has neither accepted nor rejected his idea, an Obama administration official said.

The United States would not welcome inclusion of Iran because it is part of the problem, said Susan E. Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations. Egypt and other key actors would also most likely reject Iran, seeing it as rewarding bad behavior, diplomats said.

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TimesCast | U.N. Observers Blocked

United Nations observers say that they were prevented from entering the site of another reported massacre in Syria, and that government forces shot at them.

But Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, included Iran in a proposed meeting he announced Thursday. It was the same idea but the question of the participants and the setting had to be reconciled, diplomats said. Mr. Lavrov said Moscow was proposing to host a meeting of 15 nations and organizations to discuss the crisis, according to the Interfax news service.

The goal would be to “agree with a circle of outside players, without the Syrians, about how we should use our influence on each Syrian group,” Mr. Lavrov said, paving the way to ending “all military excesses” and starting the political dialogue.

Since Moscow has recently emphasized that it is not wedded to Mr. Assad, the key to Russian support is probably ensuring that the transition to a new government is spelled out.

But Mr. Assad could still reject any international effort that he considers subversive. Vice President Farouk Sharaa, for example, has disappeared from public view ever since he was named by the Arab League as a possible transitional leader.

Many Syrians argue the massacres in places like Houla and Qubeir are meant to drive Sunnis out of areas near Alawite villages. Some believe the goal is to create a wholly Alawite state as a refuge for the government. Here in Antakya, abutting Syria, Dr. Osama al-Khalid, a refugee who fled here three weeks ago, stood next to his son and a neighbor from the northern town of Saraqib, both young men recuperating from severe bullet wounds.

Dr. Khalid said he had spent the past few months rushing patients from one village to the next, trying to escape constant government attacks.

“The security barrier around Saraqib tightened to the point where it was stifling,” he said. “There is nothing for them except a security solution because they are not ready politically for anything else.”

Correction: June 7, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated the location of Houla as in eastern Syria.

Neil MacFarquhar reported from Antakya, and Rick Gladstone from New York. Ellen Barry contributed reporting from Moscow, and Alan Cowell from London.

A version of this article appears in print on June 8, 2012, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Syrians Bar U.N. Monitors From a Massacre Inquiry. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe